Freud Handout

Civilization and Its Discontents

28 July 1929 Freud’s Letter to Lou Andreas Salome

[My book] is about culture, guilt, happiness and similar lofty matters and seems to me...to be superfluous in contrast to my earlier works, that were always attended by a certain urgency. But what should I do? One can't just smoke and play cards all day. I can't really walk for long and most of what there is to read no longer interests me. I wrote and passed the time most pleasantly, and while writing this book, I have rediscovered the most banal truths.

Background

 Written 1929, published 1930. First World War as defining experience for Freud and his contemporaries. WWI as the first technologically advanced war, with the use of tanks, poison gas, etc. Death became anonymous in the trenches, mass killing took place for the first time in this war. This experience generated a new sense of pessimism about the human being and human nature.
 Freud himself represents a profoundly pessimistic point of view in this treatise. He transfers the individual psychic conflict (between ego and id; pleasure principle and reality principle; unconscious and conscious mind; etc.) to the domain of human civilization. Civilization itself comes to be defined as a space of conflict, or as an extension into cultural community of the tensions that stigmatize the individual psyche. In this sense Freud shares in a general cultural pessimism, or anti-modernism, a kind of skepticism about the accomplishments of civilization, that is typical of this period.
 Freud begins Civilization by countering an objection to his book “The Future of an Illusion” made Romain Rolland. Rolland agrees with Freud about the illusory nature of organized religion, but he maintains that humans share a common feeling of innate religiosity. Rolland calls this an "oceanic" feeling in which the individual feels bonded with the entire world and the whole human race. It is a sense of oneness, boundlessness, limitlessness.
 Freud acknowledges the existence of this "oceanic" feeling, but for him it does not bespeak an innate religiosity. Instead, he explains it by turning to psychoanalytic experience:
 Boundlessness, oneness, a sense of union with the entire world Freud identifies with infantile narcissism (lasts from birth - 2 or 3 yrs old). In this stage, the child is pure ego and does not yet distinguish between the subjective self and an objective outside world.
 This state of absolute narcissism, in which the ego subsumes the world in its entirety, is not broken until the infant realizes that it cannot satisfy its own demands—it recognizes its reliance on others and an objective world on the basis of lack or the experience of unfulfillment. The world emerges as an "other," in short, only as a negative experience for the child: as the impossibility of satisfaction, a disruption of the demand for pleasure, as a threat and as something painful. The objective world for Freud is always nothing other than the object of desire, and it makes its presence known by the fact that the ego cannot satisfy its own desire, but that this satisfaction must come from elsewhere, from an other that the ego cannot control.
 Freud interprets the “oceanic” feeling as a psychic remnant of this initial infantile narcissism. He notes that it is not uncommon for such remnants of previous stages of psychic development to remain as part of the psyche even after this stage as such has been superseded. The “oceanic” feeling is just such a psychic remnant of our narcissistic ego.
 Freud concludes that the source of religious feeling is not simply the memory of primary narcissism; rather, for him it derives from the helplessness of the infant, its need for protection by a stronger, more powerful force. Hence religions project their gods typically as father figures, who are allusions to the desire for such a protective figure.

Double-sided nature of the Pleasure Principle:

 In its positive manifestation, the pleasure principle simply names the egoistic drive for the satisfaction of all our demands; it is a drive to gain pleasure.
 But we quickly realize that the external world and the demands of others interfere and prevents the satisfaction of many of our desires—enter the Reality Principle, our awareness that our demands cannot all be met.
 This leads to a second, negative expression of the pleasure principle; the attempt to avoid displeasure as much as possible.
 We thus learn to renounce desires or demands that cannot be met, since this causes us less displeasure than giving in to the desire and having it left unsatisfied.
 Palliative Measures: Strategies that help us avoid life’s miseries:
 Deflections: we re-channel our demands and desires into areas where they can more easily be satisfied. In this category Freud includes scientific activity or other forms of professional achievement (work).
 Substitutive Satisfactions: these are forms of compensation for lack of pleasure elsewhere. Here Freud includes all forms of illusion, including religious fervor, fantasy, escape into art, etc.
 Intoxication: we escape our displeasure by forgetting it, shunting it aside and turning to things like alcohol, drugs, etc. Here we treat the symptoms (our displeasure itself), not the causes (the reasons for our displeasure).
 Typical responses to this need for pleasure and protection from displeasure: 1) retreat, asceticism, life of the "monk"; 2) go on the attack = the person of action, the politician, reformer, etc.; 3) displacement or sublimation = finding pleasure through substitute sources over which one has better control, such as scientific work, scholarship, etc.; 4) escape into illusions = fantasy, religion, drugs, etc.; 5) adopting an "aesthetic" attitude = cultivating a love of beauty (essentially another substitutive satisfaction), art; 6) embracing the world, turning to philanthropy, turning Eros into Caritas (general love and care for humanity).

The Three Sources of Human Suffering

1. The human body: it is feeble, weak; we are mortal; the body causes us pain.
2. The world: the superiority of nature; natural catastrophes; our inability to control nature; nature as necessity.
3. Social relations: society, social legislation, other human beings which all limit the satisfaction of our pleasure

 Of these 3 sources, the first 2 seem unavoidable; we cannot overcome the frailty of our bodies, and we will never control nature completely.
 But the third category, social relations, seems as though it should be under human control. We cannot explain why we cannot dispense with social suffering, why we cannot regulate our social interactions in such a way that they do not avoid the greatest displeasure for all.
 This leads Freud to one of his central hypotheses: The reason why we cannot dispense with social displeasure is because a piece of nature lies behind social conflict In other words, our social contracts are not determined simply by reason, but are also a function and manifestation of our instincts. The conflict that arises for us as social conflict is a reflection of the tensions that structure the human psyche. We cannot escape social conflict because it is merely a repetition on the communal level of the psychic conflicts of the individual. Nature, in short, remains the common denominator of all our sources of pain.
 This will lead Freud to the formulation of a new thesis: the existence of an aggressive instinct that parallels and complements our other primary instinct, the libidinal drive.

Civilization as a Source of Our Unhappiness, Our Malaise or Discontent

 Civilization, although its purpose would seem to be amelioration of human misery and suffering, is actually partially responsible for that suffering, according to Freud. This explains our subliminal hostility toward civilization.
 What is the purpose of civilization?
 It protects humans from nature, provides a line of defense
 It adjusts and regulates the mutual relations among human beings; it establishes conventions for our organization and interaction.
 But aside from these more pragmatic, utilitarian aspects, civilization also promotes things that seems useless: e.g. beauty (art), order, rules of cleanliness, etc. In short, civilization also produces "luxuries." It enhances the "quality of life."
 What are the negative aspects of civilization that cause it to produce unhappiness?
 The power of the individual is sacrificed to the power of the group; strong individuals find that they are marginalized and must make greater concessions.
 Civilization diminishes the liberty and freedom of the individual. We mistakenly believe that social institutions promote and protect our liberties, but they limit them and are the cause of displeasure.
 The conditions of civilization demand that we disobey our instincts; this is the most difficult thing for human beings to do because we are basically egocentric and driven toward the satisfaction of our instincts. Also, suppressing our instincts will come back to haunt us by becoming “pathological”.
 Civilization places limitations on sexuality; it not only dictates what forms of sexual expression are "permissible," and censors all others, but it even places strict restrictions on the forms of sexuality it allows - e.g., society insists on monogamy, faithfulness to a single partner, and limits sexual expression according to gender roles, etc.
Bottom line: When humans enter into social bonds and the strictures of civilization, they sacrifice a portion of their happiness in the interest of greater security. We trade immediate gratification for long-term stability. In other words, we renounce pleasure in one large and intensive "payment" and opt instead for the pleasure on the installment plan, spread out in smaller increments over a longer period of time.
According to Freud, all of this leads to a sense of what he calls "cultural frustration": we feel inhibited, limited by our accession to culture. What civilization and the management of our drives and instincts offers us, in short, is a greater degree of predictability, and this helps compensate for the renunciations we have to make.

How Does Civilization Emerge?

Eros and Ananke, love and necessity, as the parents of civilization.

 The family as germinal unit of society develops out of the wish to remove the element of chance from genital satisfaction; the primitive father demands the constant presence of the mother and compensates her by providing stable satisfaction of her material, existential needs.
 Caritas, or generalized love of humanity at large, emerges as a strategy for avoiding the down-side of exclusive love. Love not only provides us with the greatest satisfactions, but it also makes us more vulnerable than any other emotion. To avoid or minimize this vulnerability, we invest our erotic impulses into multiple objects. Note once again Freud's economic thinking: even in love we hedge our bets, protect ourselves from erotic bankruptcy by, as it were, diversifying our erotic portfolio.
 Civilization also emerges out of totemic culture on the basis of the strategic union of the weaker sons against the power and authority of the father. The banding together of the sons, their subordination of their mutual hostilities for the purpose of a strategic alliance against the father, is one of the first acts of civilization. Note how in this conception civilization emerges from a negative, aggressive impulse; the war of all against all, that constitutes the state of nature, is suspended solely in order to dethrone a mutual and more powerful "enemy."

Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death, Affection and Aggression

 Freud revises his theory of the instincts; where he had previously focused primarily on libidinal drives (Eros), he now acknowledges what he calls the "aggressive instinct," which he associates with the god of death, Thanatos. Freud had earlier opposed those who postulated the existence of an aggressive instinct and resisted the acceptance of this notion; in his later writings (after WWI), however, he reluctantly comes to accept this hypothesis.


Eros Interhuman bonding Love and “Caritas” Life Drive for Integration
Thanatos Fragmentation, dissolution of bonds Aggression Death War of all against all.


 Freud conceives of civilization in parallel to his conception of the individual psyche as a product of the struggle between these two fundamental instincts. Civilization itself, thus, is "conflicted," the product of antagonistic drives and impulses. The types of civilization that arise can reflect different blends of these two drives, so that societies themselves, or cultures, might be seen to have a particulaar or peculiar psychologically determined "character."

The Aggressive Instinct and the Generation of the Super-Ego

In the context of the aggressive instinct, Freud discusses three different possible developmental origins of the super-ego whose sole purpose (as conscience) is the discipline and punishment of the ego.
1. The super-ego is the psychic internalization of an external authority figure, especially the father or the parents in general.
2. The super-ego develops as the internalization of those aggressive instincts that one cannot successfully turn outward.
3. The economy of the psyche demands that instincts can never be dispelled but only diverted or re-directed. Since civilization forces us to check and repress our aggressive instinct, those instinctual impulses that are suppressed are turned against the ego itself.
These internally directed aggressions become the basis for the super-ego and its ego-punishment. The more aggression that is diverted inward, the greater the power of the super-ego becomes. That explains why often those who are least inclined to immoral acts are also those who are most severely punished by their own conscience.

The Super-Ego and the Sense of "Guilt".

 Guilt is produced by the super-ego as that internal psychic control mechanism that serves the interests of civilization by suppression our aggressive instincts.
 We feel guilty for the very wish or desire to do evil.
 We must distinguish remorse from guilt. Remorse we feel after committing some unacceptable deed. Guilt does not require action, but merely the thought or intention of carrying out that act. Remorse is after the fact; guilt is before, or in absence of the fact.
 Freud concludes by asking why our dissatisfaction with civilization, which inhibits our instinctual life and ultimately becomes, in the form of the super-ego, our most severe tyrant and taskmaster, expresses itself merely as a vague feeling of malaise.
 His answer: Because it is a form of psychic anxiety, and like all anxiety it is unconscious, not recognized or even recognizable directly, because it is repressed and censored.
 The price of human civilization, according to Freud, is thus that we become civilized at the price of sacrificing a degree of our egoistic happiness and succumbing to a pervasive sense of guilt. This is what constitutes our "discontent" with civilization, despite the obvious benefits it brings us.

GLOSSARY:

Affection: aim-inhibited sexuality. We connect affectionately because we can't spend all our time having sex.

Analysis, the purpose of: to give the ego more control over the repressed id impulses. "Where there is id, there shall ego be."

Culture, two purposes of: to protect us against nature, and to regulate our affairs with each other. To adapt to life in a culture, one must repress one's drives (repress one's sexuality and aggression, displacing the second onto suitable targets outside the culture and sublimating the first into other achievements). "Man is a savage beast," and to repeat a quotation from Plautus which Freud liked, "Homo homini lupus" ("Man is a wolf to man"--written, presumably, by a wolf). So Eros and Ananke (Love and Necessity) are the parents of civilization, and social restrictions on sexuality are unavoidable. Were it not for our need to live with one another, we could allow our drives free play and not be neurotic.
(Translation Note: this term, kultur in German, is often mistranslated civilization, as in Civilization and its Discontents - "Discontents" per Freud should be translated "discomfort" or "malaise").

Defense Mechanism: a maneuver employed by the ego to protect itself against anxiety raised by intolerable impulses. All involve some degree of repression of the unacceptable impulse into unconsciousness. Examples include denial, idealization, splitting (e.g., both loving and hating someone but keeping both emotions entirely separate), reaction formation (e.g., becoming a Scoutmaster to prove to yourself that you don't hate children), undoing (basically, trying to repair an action for which you feel guilty), and an American favorite, intellectualization ("You ask me how I feel, and it seems to me that the relevancy of the issue has more to do with my sublimated urge to..." blah).

Drive: Trieb in German; this word is almost always translated "instinct," incorrectly. By drive Freud meant the bodily demands upon mental life. Freud believed in good materialist fashion that mind arose from drive, ego from id. A drive has a source (bodily needs that arise from the erogenous zones), an impetus, an internal aim (temporary removal of the bodily need), an external aim (the steps taken to reach the final goal of the internal aim), and an object. Drives give rise to the libido-energy that drives all psychological activity. We never experience the drive itself, just its representation or idea in the mind. Drives undergo repression and sublimation when confronted by the real world.

Ego: the "I," a rational, organized agency that distills gradually out of a passionate id that rubs up against reality. Emerging from an undifferentiated mass of sensations (chiefly those emanating from the surface of the body), formed by identifications and abandoned id cathexes, and strengthened by speech, which links auditory and visual memory traces with the conscious life, the ego strives to harmonize inner and outer, drives (which it keeps at bay mainly via repression, sublimation and anticathexes), inhibition, and reality.

Eros: one of the two basic sources of all the drives. Eros, whose name comes from the Greek god of love, is the principle of life; it binds together and is most clearly seen in love. Its drives tend to be more plastic and displaceable than those of its opponent, Thanatos, the death drive. Freud saw psychic life as an interplay of these two ever-interpenetrating forces, Life and Death.

God: an idealized image of a nurturing (and primal) father created to reconcile us to Fate's cruelty, compensate us for the injustices of life, lend social moralities a divine origin, and personify and appease the uncontrollable forces of nature.

Guilt: from either a dread of an external authority or dread of the demands and punishments of the superego, an internalized authority. It is through drive-repressing guilt and the resulting sublimations that civilization arose.
Id: the permanently unconscious motivational cauldron of the mind. From the id (the "it") originate all the drives that impel psychic life. A "residue of countless egos" inherited from prior generations, the id is the amoral beast within us that seeks only its own gratification through tension discharge. It is powered by the bodily instincts and is wholly irrational. Analogous to the job of the imperialist and the industrialist, the job of the ego is to dominate it.

Libido: the psychosexual energy originating in the id. Libido is the electric current of the mechanism of personality. It powers all psychological operations, invests desires, and undergoes ready displacement. It is the basic fuel of the self. Because it is of a relatively fixed quantity, like gasoline in a tank, it obeys laws of psychical "economy" in that a surplus in one system means a loss somewhere else.

Neurosis: a conflict between ego and id that produces symptoms of psychological discomfort.

Pleasure Principle (technically the Pleasure-Pain Principle): our most fundamental striving is toward pleasure and away from pain. Pleasure is what we feel when some kind of tension is relieved.

Reality Principle: the ego's sense of realistic and rational adaptive expectations. This principle evolves from and governs the heedless hedonism of the Pleasure Principle, at least in people who aren't wealthy.

Religion: a childlike yearning for an all-powerful Parent to take away feelings of helplessness that arise from confronting the forces of nature. A collective neurosis. An illusion (not necessarily an error) arising from childish wishes, religion spares many a believer an individual neurosis by reducing him to "psychical infantilism."

Repression: the ego's ridding itself of unacceptable desires and ideas by dumping them into unconsciousness.

Superego: an agency that safeguards society from uncontrolled acting out by giving the person an internalization of all environmental inhibitions, particularly those of the parents. It's a kind of parent-within formed of reaction formations to unconscious sexual wishes; disobeying it creates guilt.

Unconscious: that which is repressed out of awareness. Its core is instinct-representations consisting of wish-impulses. Also, see Id.